It's not as simple as that. Web advertising is taking a bath, and it's going to get worse. Probably a lot worse.
http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm
You can just look this stuff up, it turns out, you needn't make wild (and, it turns out, completely wrong) guesses.
Total gross advertising dollars rises and falls with the overall economy. How it is parsed out and the methods used change. We can see this in action with major sites like cnn and facebook where click-bait is the new normal. In traditional forms of media (print, broadcast, outdoor), the dollars continue to shift but maintain their edge as they have proven and measurable results. As I look at the banner advertisement on the top of this very page as I type this message, I see advertisements for a virtual photography workshop in Japan, Mamiya Leaf, Cambo, ARCA Swiss, Alpa and Phase One products. None of which have any bearing to me. Again, this is a sign that the target demographic of this site is so narrow that it is self filtering and self limiting.
My wild, completely wrong, guesses are probably not so wild and completely wrong. It was not clearly stated whether or not LL gets one million visitors a month or one million UNIQUE visitors a month. For a site like this, that can be as high as a 20:1 difference. No wild guesses, this is the fact. This means that the typical person visiting LL will visit as many as 20 times a month. This includes the forums. The stats are easy to pull. My own site averages 2.5 visits a month per visitor with 4.7 page views per visit. 20 times a month might be a little high, but for a site with an active forum, that is not unusual. The non-forum part of LL with actual publisher provided content is likely closer to my 2.5 visits per month average.
Regardless, this is where I have a problem with the numbers. If this site really is getting one million UNIQUE visitors a month, with an average of four page-views per visitor, this is SERIOUSLY sellable. An active advertising placement team would be able to monetize this in a heartbeat. ONE MILLION SETS OF EYEBALLS EVERY MONTH!!! Facebook, which is worth billions upon billions of dollars only gets 800 times that many sets of eyeballs. LL is giving away tens of thousands of dollars a month in FREE advertising to these companies providing success-based advertising commission income. I know how much click-revenue there is because I use it on my site too and it is just enough to cover my web-hosting fees and an occasional Starbucks Latte. At the peak, my website was producing over 40,000 UNIQUE visitors a month, and I realized that I was literally giving away tremendous amounts of advertising to companies in exchange for an occasional pittance. In the broadcast world, these are known as PI (per inquiry) advertisements and the only time they are run is in the middle of the night where no other advertiser will bother wasting their money. The PI advertisements are used to fill commercial breaks during network feeds. On cable television, these are usually the commercials for 20 CD sets of songs from some dead person for 12 monthly payments of $10 each. You'll never encounter these advertisements during the morning drive time on radio or the evening news hour on television.
I am NOT saying that this site isn't getting one million unique visitors a month or even one million visits a month. I don't have access to the web stats for this site. But either way, this is an example where our experts on photography and camera-exotica have made a substantial business error in not having an effective sales/marketing team to monetize the site. Changing to a subscription model MIGHT work out in the long run, but I don't think the statistics are on LL's side in this regard.
Ken
